


Venturesome

by SlashHat



Series: Top Gear fic [3]
Category: Top Gear (UK) RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Banter, Established Relationship, IN SPACE!, It's set in space OK?, Jeremy is a vegetarian, M/M, Mild Peril, Moving In Together, Sentient Spaceship, Space engineers, Space pilots, Sweet, archiving old fic, zoom zoom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-14
Updated: 2008-03-14
Packaged: 2020-05-31 09:21:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19423081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SlashHat/pseuds/SlashHat
Summary: Jeremy has got himself killed again. James and Richard are fed up to the teeth with him.Far future AU set on a giant spaceship; relationship negotiations nearly scuppered by engine failure.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the TopGearSlash Livejournal comm.
> 
> Many thanks to [](https://serriadh.livejournal.com/profile)[serriadh](https://serriadh.livejournal.com/) for betaing.

The universe is too big to imagine; it slips away from you, clusters of galaxies flaming across the staggering brain like glitter falling from a knocked-over bottle. Can you picture a galaxy? One spiral arm of the galaxy? Can you see the few hundreds of stars with people living around them, or perhaps see the ships that move between them, so small, so slow, merely kilometres long and moving at half the speed of light? Imagine thousands of ships stitching the worlds together, and a few, moving outwards, taking the tiny sparks of life to new planets. Think of the myriads of people born among the stars, living their lives in delicate artificial worlds.

Think of one ship. Think of one man.

\--

They had so nearly made it, just two more corners and then home, finally all qualified on these brilliant new patrol craft, officially allowed to save the good ship Venturesome from alien scum. Well, from space debris, anyway. And, y'know, there was surely a possibility of alien scum one day, and then they would be right out there, saving. Jeremy pulled his attention from planning celebrations back to the course overlaid on his viewscreen, saw the massive rock a few kilometres ahead, and a plan arrived full blown in his head; he could feel the grin starting, didn't bother to restrain it, and flipped on the communicator.

"All right, watch this!"

He pulled round in a beautiful, tight curve- my god, the elegance of this thing- get just the right approach, reach out, and-  
Fuck. Clipped it, tumbling, am I gonna hit- fuck- the radio going "no!" in two voices-

A very loud noise, and flames.

The headache was much worse than last time. He grimaced and pulled off the headset guiltily. The others had already unhooked and were looming over his couch looking far from ready to have a laugh about how rubbish that had been.

"You bloody hit me, you moron," said Richard, through clenched teeth.

"Jesus, Jeremy, we nearly had it that time. Ten more sodding clear runs we need now! Helen's going to laugh her arse off."

"You bloody hit me! What the hell were you playing at, anyway?"

Jeremy played for time, unfastening the top of the suit and struggling out of it, taking a minute to uncrumple his shirtsleeves and smooth his hair. Sadly, the others were still glaring at him when he had finished. He glanced out of the cubicle at the ships sitting silently in their cradles on the other side of the dock. He winced, and tried to find the energy to shout. "There's something wrong with the program- I was metres away from that meteorite! I don't see why the hell that wouldn't count as completed-"

"You fucking well misjudged your manipulator, hit the thing, and then bloody hit me, you bastard, that's why it won't count! I can't believe how crap you are."

"Painkiller?" offered James. Sadly, he was holding the pack out to Richard. Richard sighed noisily, nodded, and took one of the capsules. He was clearly holding back from yelling something else. Jeremy could only be grateful for this, as he felt any more loud noises would probably make his head explode.

There was nothing for it. "Look, I'm sorry, OK? It was irresistible - I saw that turn and had to try it. I didn't mean to hit you. Obviously. And I did die myself here, lots of fire, crackle crackle ow. Can I please have one of those?"

James snarled exasperatedly, but chucked him the pack. "I'm a much better person than you and you owe me a massive favour, all right? Now Richard and I are going to have a poke round the ships."

"We can't do that yet," he objected.

"No, Jeremy," said Richard, pointedly. " _You_ can't do that yet. Because you can't seem to stop killing yourself on the fucking sim. We've been cleared to use them for a week, but we were being nice. I don't think I can be arsed with that today, what with you- did I point it out- HAVING BLOODY WELL HIT ME."

"Well, we can go back in and try another run, instead of wimping out and having a nice sit in the seats and fiddling with the screens! I just died and I'm not ready to give up. Anyway, why were you even in my way? If you hadn't been there I'd have righted myself no problem."

Richard audibly ground his teeth, ran his hands through his hair so it stuck up in all directions and stalked off towards the leftmost patrol craft.

Jeremy felt distinctly hopeful for a moment, as James looked as though he was actually considering that it might have all been Richard's fault. Sadly, the faint possibility of an ally quickly disappeared. James shook his head briefly and raised his eyebrows at Jeremy in a superior manner.

"We've only got half an hour longer on there today, remember? Not long enough. You need to go over the crash, anyway. Work out what went wrong." Then he, too, turned away.

Jeremy hauled himself off the couch, staggering slightly, and followed them out of the simulator cubicle, ready to keep arguing as soon as he had an opening.

Richard paused for a moment as he neared the door of the small ship. "Well, we know what went wrong - the arse behind the tiller."

"Yeah, but 'Cause of accident: lunacy' never looks good on the form, does it?" James called over. "We need something more specific: 'Driver vastly overestimated own skill', or something."

"Driver thinks he still has the reflexes of a twenty-year-old."

"Driver thinks he can make rocks get out of his way by shouting at them."

Neither of them were paying any attention to Jeremy. He was left trying to work out how to win any points back, and feeling achy, angry, guilty and just a bit stupid. And, as Richard's handprint opened his ship's door, pretty bloody jealous.

Jealous of Richard getting his hands on that beautiful bit of metal first, obviously. He wasn't jealous of the ship. That hand _was_ nearly caressing the doorframe, but really, if he started being envious of inanimate things Richard happened to touch, it was only a matter of time before he went a bit odd and started smashing the hell out of a notepad for being a little tart, or something. He realised he was frowning, which was only making the headache worse. One of the painkillers might be a good idea. He swallowed it hastily before it could dissolve (choking would give the others an excellent opportunity to helpfully thump him on the back, after all.)

Richard's collar beeped and he paused halfway into the cabin. "Yes?"

The reception wasn't brilliant down here, but they could all hear the scratchy voice. "Oh, good, thought you'd still be under. Look, can you get up to Left straight away? Ten forward's gone completely this time, and we can't work out why. We'll need to pull it apart."

"Damn! Jeremy, I'm taking the pod, OK?"

He nodded - this must be serious, if the engine team were pulling people out of secondary roles.

"Right. I'll be there in twenty. End."

Richard took a moment for a longing glance back into the doorway, but wasted no more time in making for the podcars sitting in the corner of the dock. He ducked into the sleeker of the two and pulled away, calling "Ship, open interior doors," as they grew nearer. He pulled out through the opening gap and disappeared down the tunnel.

Jeremy had a thought. Perhaps this one would cause less problems than the last one had. "I'll get over to Right, I think. If Left's calling everyone up, they'll probably be short."

"D'you want a lift? I can head straight to the Wets from there."

He nodded gratefully. "I can't say I feel like that climb."

"In agony? Serves you right, you berk."

"Just because you never take a ship to the edge. D'you really have no sense of adventure? How do you know what a craft can do if you don't push it?"

"You'll never find out what they can do at all if you don't qualify, you useless twit," said James. Jeremy was pleased, however, to see his frown suggested something more like his usual level of exasperation with him than the anger there had been a few moments before. They both walked over to James's pod.

"It'll only take a few more days," Jeremy felt he had to point out.

"While the other teams practice in the real thing. Have you seen Helen and Aysha? They're flying like demons."

He had to agree. "Yeah. I think there really is that twenty percent more speed that we were promised. Looks unbelievable."

"And they seem to have cracked the cornering this time - assuming the driver can cope, of course."

Jeremy couldn't summon up the energy to do more than scowl. James started the pod, and they hummed slowly out of the bay.

"Shall I come over to Right as well?" James offered.

"Have you got any time in since they upgraded?"

"No."

"Might not be anyone around to show you the differences. Besides, what good does fixing the engines do if we all starve to death?"

James snorted softly. "Ha. A ship full of skeletons tumbling through the endless void."

"They scrawl "It's all May's fault for not maintaining the hydroponics, aargh" on the front with their last strength."

"What, the skeletons?"

"No, before they die, you fool."

"I don't think they'd spend energy on doing that. They'd probably just hunt me down and eat me."

"Blood sacrifice, to make the valves unstick? Could work."

By the time they came out from the maintenance tunnels into the empty under-deck spaces, May was the Summer King, ruling for a season and then being ceremonially flung into the fuel hopper. The debate as to who should be the Winter King was just getting interesting (James was completely wrong, there was just no way anyone would vote for that lifeless sod Morgan to be King even if he did get chucked in the reservoir at the end of it) when they emerged into the habitation deck to find there were still houses cluttering up the roads. Why the hell hadn't Ship waited until the night shift to move them? He reckoned that yelling at James to overtake might not go down brilliantly today, so he fumed in silence. (Mostly silence. Everyone has limits. There may have been the odd growl.)

"How long before everybody's settled in the new town configurations?" asked James idly.

"Another month or so, I think." Twenty-six days and seventeen hours. No idea how many minutes. That would be obsessive.

"Must say I'll be glad- I know how much more efficient it's all supposed to be, but you can never find anyone at the moment, they've moved halfway to the stern overnight or something."

"Mm. Bloody traffic hazard, too." And twenty-six days was until the moves finished. There was less time than that for planning. If a household, hypothetically, had a preference for where they were moved to, they would, hypothetically, have to give Ship notice pretty soon. Why had he tried to be flash? A celebration of everyone finally qualifying, a few drinks- that would have been perfect. Damn. He gazed morosely out of the window, quite enjoying making himself more depressed by catching glimpses of large landscaping robots smoothing over holes where houses had once been.

He wasn't sorry when they reached the control room. The prospect of being busy was welcome. He'd just have to hope that Richard was distracted enough by wrestling with a buggered jet and the prospect of engine failure, lack of power, and death for 20,000 crew and passengers if they couldn't work out what was wrong, to forget he was angry.  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jeremy waits for news from the team fixing the engine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [](https://serriadh.livejournal.com/profile)[serriadh](https://serriadh.livejournal.com/) for betaing.

The shift in the Right control room was reassuringly dull. No flashing lights came on for the skeleton crew to look at, no sirens went off; there were just little beepers beeping normally and scopes tracing out entirely usual lines. They were able to spare some attention for the video feed from Left, but it mostly wasn't very informative - the camera couldn't move much, so what they mainly saw was a pile of engine parts getting higher and higher. The audio was pretty bad, too, and what did get picked up was nine-tenths swearing. Jeremy jumped once at an unmistakeable voice yelping in pain, but relaxed as nobody rushed about calling for medics. Trust that idiot to drop a spanner on his foot or something. (He was still relieved when the pointy little features briefly passed across the screen covered in nothing worse than grime and a feral grin.)

Enough of the normal night crew turned up eventually that Jeremy could go home, and he could certainly fret just as well there. The cool air and scent of plants made the walk quite pleasant, he supposed, although it was a bit further than he'd normally bother with. As soon as he got in the kitchen he rolled the screen down and put the engineering feed on. Nothing much seemed to have changed. He fished around in the freezer for something edible, not that he was hungry.

He made some efforts to find something to do, but his thoughts circled back to engines or house moves every time, so eventually he settled on staring into thin air, feeling a sense of impending doom and trying not to pull any hair out. Sometimes he stared out of the window for a change of pace. Even in the dimness of the night shift you could see the wall of the ship from here, majestically curving upwards out of sight, covered with small lights twinkling in a reminder of the stars outside. He'd have to make sure you could still see this from somewhere in the new house. If they had a choice on the site. What would it be like in a town, anyway, all crammed in with people metres away? He supposed it must work or Ship wouldn't be so set on it. Be odd, though. He'd miss the neighbours from here. Though it was only a couple of k away, of course. He stared at nothing some more.

Finally, some time after midnight, the voices murmuring over the feed started to change from worried to intrigued to excited to argumentative to intent. Someone was waving a couple of metal bits in and out of view - not the intakes, not the filter, what shape were they, dammit?

Just when he was getting seriously frustrated, someone's hand loomed up to the camera and tapped it in a couple of places and links appeared on the screen. 'Location of fault' was in Richard's familiar loopy writing. Jeremy touched it, to see a hastily-modified schematic of the engines with the separator throbbing a sickly pink. The accompanying picture showed its lining pitted to hell- amazing it hadn't conked out before. OK. Fixable. Anything else? 'Possible causes'. This was Mo, looking about three-quarters dead and with his voice mostly gone, giving a  
five-minute rundown of nasty things that might have gone wrong. "The one we reckon is most likely is a bad batch of fuel. We'll let you know more tomorrow, OK?"

As he started to contemplate all the ways in which this was not good, he heard the familiar hum of a podcar drawing up to the house. He hurriedly rolled up the screen, turned up the heat under the somewhat dried-out soup and listened to the footsteps dragging up the path.

"Food," muttered Richard as he shuffled through the door. He collapsed onto a chair. Jeremy took a quick look up and down him - covered in oil, one sleeve ripped and a bandage beneath, eyes a bit reddened and sunk slightly into head. Not too bad. He sliced off most of the bread and scooped out a lump of soup, put them both within Richard's reach, and sat back to watch them disappear.

"This is a lifesaver. You're lucky, by the way - I don't have the energy to kill you." Richard was visibly reviving as he inhaled the food.

"Talk," Jeremy suggested.

"You've seen what we found?"

"I had a quick look, yeah."

"The thing that makes most sense is that batch of hydrogen we picked up a couple of months ago, which means-"

"- all the other jets are going to go as well."

"Yeah. Kath and Ahmed are writing a diagnostic tonight, we'll test it tomorrow and then start checking them all, but Mo's going over to wake up the Stig to turn on the backups for the main engines and turn the primaries off."

"Brave man. Think you'll see him tomorrow? How long do they take to cool?"

"About a week. So we'll have lots of practice fixing the smaller ones before we do them. I reckon Stig puts those rumours round himself, you know? I mean, you can't trust Mari, the fixed stare and raving of things man was not meant to see were probably just a flashback."

Voices in the kitchen had clearly woken the household; furry faces appeared round the doorframe. Imp, as ever, trotted straight for her dish and made it clear that she was shocked and distressed that it was empty, while Fred hopped across and leapt up onto the bench beside Richard, who stroked his ears and absently broke off a bit of crust for each of them.

Jeremy put the rest of the loaf in front of Richard. "You'll be busy."

"Yes, Jeremy, I won't have time to put in the hours on the sims with you. God, you're subtle."

"I didn't mean that! I don't actually want the ship to stop working just so I can qualify on an upgraded patrol craft, actually. I was being, you know, concerned and all that."

Richard laughed softly. "I believe you. It'll be fine now we know where the problems are- well, I say fine, the sep's about the nastiest place to get to in the whole damn thing, but it's not too bad providing you remember to take off the solid fans first."

Jeremy nodded to the bandage. "You forgot, I take it?"

"Nah, misjudged the edge of the manifold."

"Prat. Thought your arm was even titchier than it is?"

Richard flicked him an amiable v-sign, luckily not with the hand holding the spoon.

"Do you have enough bodies?" Jeremy said.

"Might need you sometime. Lee's working out who's got enough experience to help. But not the whole time."

"I'll go over the crashes with James, then."

Richard tilted his head. "It might be good to get that sorted out, yeah. Unless you actually want to be stuck running shuttles back and forth while May and I are being all heroic zooming around in the patrollers, zapping meteorites and scaring away pirates." He paused and raised a quizzical eyebrow. "You were trying to impress him earlier, weren't you?"

"No! Maybe. A bit. Look, it should have worked - swoop over, kick the rock, and did you see the vectors? It should've been pushed straight into the path of the main engine exhaust and vaporised. Nothing left. Elegant as a fish coming up, grabbing a crumb, nothing to see but a swirl and a bubble."

"Really, Jez. Only you try to flirt with people by blowing things up."

"I'm not the one who gave him an exploded Langford calibrator for his birthday."

"That wasn't flirting, that was a birthday present! Anyway, he liked it. Tibbs sleeps on it all the time."

"Weird."

"Yeah. Lizards. Anyway. Apologise for me, would you?"

"I'm used to doing that."

Richard's I'm-very-disappointed-in-you-Jeremy face turned into a huge yawn. "I'd better get clean and get some sleep."

"You know, I think you might fall asleep in the shower."

"Yeah?"

"And drown, or something. Can't have that."

"No?"

"So I should help you."

"God, you're subtle."

Fred was pushed off the bench as Jeremy hauled Richard bodily up.

"Certainly am."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want to point out that the thing where you can put a link inside a video feed didn't exist when I was writing this in 2008!
> 
> Fred is a rabbit and Imp is a guinea pig- the spaceship ecosystem doen't have enough spare capacity for meat-eating pets.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jeremy manages to actually talk to James.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [](https://serriadh.livejournal.com/profile)[serriadh](https://serriadh.livejournal.com/) for betaing .

It was very odd to be going over flight sims with only James. The cubicle seemed to have a lot more space in it than usual, even with the small table covered in flimsies between their chairs. It was odd being the centre of James's attention, without Hammond bouncing around distracting them both; it was really quite an interesting sensation. On the minus side, it meant he had nowhere to hide from the logic.

"Right. We all died a lot straight off, I got the hang of it pretty quickly, you and Richard kept hitting things. This would be because?"

"You're boring?"

"Yes, Jeremy, and in a very boring manner I kept my speed down until I could cope with the new handling. Anyway, then Hammond mostly got to grips with it. In fact, he hasn't been killed for a fortnight, whereas you keep getting to eight or nine clear runs and then dying from something utterly reckless. Oh, except for the one where you couldn't be bothered with the pre-flight checks and just exploded still inside the bay. Any thoughts as to why?"

It hadn't been much of an explosion, actually, just a sort of damp coughing pfft noise. Good rain of bits, though. "That was just Ship taking the piss, I reckon."

"Reminding you to do things properly, you mean. And I meant, why are you cocking up just when we all start thinking we can get our hands on those boats?"

"If you want me to talk about my relationship with my father, James, I shall have to laugh at you."

James closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. "What father? You were spawned by the devil and raised by psychopathic androids."

"I'll have you know my mother is a very calm person and hasn't killed anyone for weeks. Do you have a headache?"

"Yes. And some bugger walked off with my painkillers."

"You can't trust anyone. Well, I reckon that's enough forensics for one afternoon, don't you?" He suppressed a ridiculous urge to ask if James wanted his head rubbed. Oh, to hell with it. "Do you want your head rubbed?"

James's eyes widened, and a look Jeremy couldn't identify came into his face.

"That's unnaturally kind of you. And while you're doing it, you can talk about your death-wish."

Jeremy slowly raised his hands to James's forehead. OK, how did you actually do massages? "Shut your eyes."

He gently circled his thumbs along the eyebrows. This could be distracting. Mind you, without James looking at him, it might be easier to talk. He cleared his throat.

"Richard thinks I'm trying to impress you."

"I know."

"You get together and talk about me? I knew it! My God, how boring are your lives?"

"You'd know about Richard's," retorted James dryly. "Of course we've been trying to work out what's going on."

"Yes. Well. I don't think trying to show off what you can do a bit is a bad thing, for God's sake!" He moved further up, his thumbs nearly brushing James's hairline. James leant his head forward into Jeremy's hands.

"Not if you can actually do it, Flash Harry. You're not losing your touch, are you?"

"I don't think so." He ran his fingers gently through James's hair, decided not to think about this any more, twisted his neck round uncomfortably to get under James's head, and kissed him. He felt James smile. That made him happy enough to babble "we want - Richard - I mean, with Ship moving everyone about anyway, we'll have to shift, and, um, we wondered if you might want neighbours." What had seemed so difficult about saying that, anyway? Easiest thing in the world. He let his hands fall to James's shoulders.

"Excellent idea. Richard and I thought we could join our garages, have space for quite a decent workshop."

He bolted upright and glared accusingly at James's slightly smug-looking smile. "You sly, shifty, plotting, double-dealing pair of... of newts!"

"You left out "underhanded" and "devious"."

"How long have you been watching me and laughing, you bastard?"

"Oh, years, mate."

"Yes, thank you, ha ha. And specifically about this?"

"Hammond didn't reckon you were ever going to get your nerve up. He asked me last week."

"That's so - " he found that it was hard to be properly affronted while breaking out in an unstoppable grin.

James laughed and leant forwards again, letting his arm fall onto Jeremy's shoulder. "So, when's Richard finishing and coming down here, again?"

"A couple of hours."

"Oh, good. We can really crack on with the investigation for a while."

"I will slice you to death with these bits of paper, you know that?"

"Oh, the irony."

\--

He conceded to himself that there was a vague possibility that Richard and James might have been right - flying like a maniac to seduce someone might not necessarily be the best way to go about it. Especially James, now he thought about it. Still, everything seemed to have sorted itself out satisfactorily in the end. Feeling relaxed after some rather good sex seemed to work wonders, too. He was sure it was endorphins that let him get through ten dully safe practice runs without a murmur. It was worth it when all three of them came in from their first flight laughing and chattering at the same time.

"The cornering! Sleek as a trout!"

"That sound as you up the speed! I swear it's singing to me!"

"And did you see me when I hit the afterburner?!"

Jeremy briefly wrestled with the thought of comparing the drive to the sex, but no; there was no sense in letting them get complacent.  



	4. Epilogue

They were third overall at the end of the individual events in the Shakedown Games, and squeaked to second in the last seconds of the team maze race- Richard overtaking Clarence on almost the only bit of straight in the course, Jeremy blocking Mari, while James pulled off an amazing move, pulling round the last corner in a tight curve, reaching out with his manipulator and gently touching a lane marker just far enough into Steve's way to make him brake for a microsecond, and strolling past.  
Jeremy's yell of "Yes! VERY NEARLY TRIUMPHANT!" was echoed with two whoops across the radio and they pulled off a rather tidy triple victory roll as they swung back towards Venturesome's belly and a well-earned party.


End file.
